The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life has a corresponding typical fact in modern literature.  The typical fact in modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence that immeasurably represents what it does not say.  The difference between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to be that in Washington we have an epigram government, a government in which ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider what to do, and in which ninety million people are made to sit in one chair to see that it is done.  In Athens every man represented himself.

It may be said to be a good working distinction between modern and classic art that in modern art words and colours and sounds stand for things, and in classic art they said them.  In the art of the Greek, things were what they seemed, and they were all there.  Hence simplicity.  It is a quality of the art of to-day that things are not what they seem in it.  If they were, we should not call it art at all.  Everything stands not only for itself and for what it says, but for an immeasurable something that cannot be said.  Every sound in music is the senator of a thousand sounds, thoughts, and associations, and in literature every word that is allowed to appear is the representative in three syllables of three pages of a dictionary.  The whistle of the locomotive, and the ring of the telephone, and the still, swift rush of the elevator are making themselves felt in the ideal world.  They are proclaiming to the ideal world that the real world is outstripping it.  The twelve thousand horsepower steamer does not find itself accurately expressed in iambics on the leisurely fleet of Ulysses.  It is seeking new expression.  The command has gone forth over all the beauty and over all the art of the present world, crowded for time and crowded for space.  “Telegraph!” To the nine Muses the order flies.  One can hear it on every side.  “Telegraph!” The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and “types,” the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or twelve people.  The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as masterpieces.  The novel has come into being—­several hundred pages of crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other to oblivion; and now the novel, jostled into oblivion by the next novel, is becoming the short story.  Kipling’s short stories sum the situation up.  So far as skeleton or plot is concerned, they are built up out of a bit of nothing put with an infinity of Kipling; so far as meat is concerned, they are the Liebig Beef Extract of fiction.  A single jar of Kipling contains a whole herd of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills.

The classic of any given world is a work of art that has passed through the same process in being a work of art that that world has passed through in being a world.  Mr. Kipling represents a crowd age, because he is crowded with it; because, above all others, he is the man who produces art in the way the age he lives in is producing everything else.